Your Kickstarter campaign is doomed

[doctorbadwolf]

Tolkien called history a "long defeat," and while I'm a positive person, it's trhiugh a sort of "Memento Mori" via Negativa. Darkness and ruin await, so life is good.

I love Tolkien, but that is his most bonkers take on anything.

 

[Parmandur]

I love Tolkien, but that is his most bonkers take on anything.

Quite the contrary: the longer I live, the more that I see and learn, the more true this point of view proves.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Quite the contrary: the longer I live, the more that I see and learn, the more true this point of view proves.

My experience is the opposite.

And all available data proves the opposite. History is a long victory over bare survival, violence, and death.

These things still exist, sure, history isn’t done yet, after all. But they are exponentially reduced compared to 1000 years ago. The state of human rights in 9th Century England was common globally during that time. Now it’s the exception. Child and maternal mortality have been reduced to a tiny fraction or a fraction of what they were even a few centuries ago. Today the conversation about restoring voting rights to felons who’ve done their time is happening in several states in a nation that was founded a couple centuries ago on the idea that only white landowning men were really worth anything, much less capable of understanding the world enough to vote.

The idea that history is a long defeat is objectively preposterous.

 

[Parmandur]

My experience is the opposite.

And all available data proves the opposite. History is a long victory over bare survival, violence, and death.

These things still exist, sure, history isn’t done yet, after all. But they are exponentially reduced compared to 1000 years ago. The state of human rights in 9th Century England was common globally during that time. Now it’s the exception. Child and maternal mortality have been reduced to a tiny fraction or a fraction of what they were even a few centuries ago. Today the conversation about restoring voting rights to felons who’ve done their time is happening in several states in a nation that was founded a couple centuries ago on the idea that only white landowning men were really worth anything, much less capable of understanding the world enough to vote.

The idea that history is a long defeat is objectively preposterous.

That seems to rather be missing Tolkien's point, however, which is all those gains are ultimately temporary: individuals all die, civilizations all fall, species all become extinct, and ultimately all molecules will lose all their heat energy. It’s not thst progress is impossible or not worth working towards: but it is always, and always will be, temporary in the long run.

Tolkien's experience of being a religious minority in Victorian England, and having first hand experience of Apartheid and the ugliness of Empire before surviving WWI, and writing about the "long defeat" after WWII under the threat of nuclear and environmental armageddon...his viewpoint is understandable, particularly since he was a historian.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

That seems to rather be missing Tolkien's point, however, which is all those gains are ultimately temporary: individuals all die, civilizations all fall, species all become extinct, and ultimately all molecules will lose all their heat energy. It’s not thst progress is impossible or not worth working towards: but it is always, and always will be, temporary in the long run.

Tolkien's experience of being a religious minority in Victorian England, and having first hand experience of Apartheid and the ugliness of Empire before surviving WWI, and writing about the "long defeat" after WWII under the threat of nuclear and environmental armageddon...his viewpoint is understandable, particularly since he was a historian.

Lol Heat death of the universe, really?

I’m out. Have fun.

 

[Parmandur]

Lol Heat death of the universe, really?

I’m out. Have fun.

Yes, not even slightly joking. That's what Tolkien means, though nuclear war or ecological disaster were more immediate concerns in his mind (as they remain, and still hang over our heads).

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yes, not even slightly joking. That's what Tolkien means, though nuclear war or ecological disaster were more immediate concerns in his mind (as they remain, and still hang over our heads).

I know that you know what “I’m out” means.

 

[Autumnal]

That means you reload while the rest of us carry on.

 

[mamba]

And all available data proves the opposite. History is a long victory over bare survival, violence, and death.

no, it really isn’t, you are just living at a time where we managed to claw our way up for a microsecond, and you focus on that microsecond. In the grand scheme of things mankind is a blip and the last 2000 years or so amount to nothing (not that this was a steady uphill climb even then either…)

A hundred years from now, people will probably already feel very differently about the trajectory. Heck, I already do

These things still exist, sure, history isn’t done yet, after all. But they are exponentially reduced compared to 1000 years ago. The state of human rights in 9th Century England was common globally during that time. Now it’s the exception.

your timescale is much too small, and you have the benefit of being being around at roughly the best time for humans

 

[dragoner]

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning."
- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

Many scientists give us around 40-60 years left, it is what it is. Extinction is the price of existence I guess.